How could Warp be improved?

Battlescape
41

Our “job” as backers is to let INS know what we like and don’t like about their implementation. I’ve been following this project for almost a decade, presenting countless ideas, and finding zero traction all the way. INS is confident that they know what to build and it’s just a matter of building it.

So feel free to share ideas, but expect it to be treated as feedback about what you like or don’t like about the current system. So you might as well just say what you like or don’t like about the current system. INS will come up with the ideas needed to address those likes and dislikes.

For what gameplay should the system be adjusted?

2 Likes
42

I completely agree with @cybercritic. During the last play session I was flying to different “battle scapes” and after multiple manual warp entries it appeared to be more annoying than “immersive” to manually click the warp menu button. Also sometimes I did not have enough energy to warp so it creates an extra hurdle for the player.

Automating that would be really cool (we can still provide manual warp by enabling it in the options if a player wants an “immersive” experience, even if I don’t agree with it being immersive)

There is a reason for warp to not be automatic. You can’t fire weapons in warp. Granted that at higher velocities attempts at combat are pretty futile, but it’s still an option. Likewise, you can always use the flexibility of warp to cause mischief by buzzing enemies at low warp and then departing again before you attract fire.

What about making warp manually in battle? So when being outside of battle, it happens automatically. In battle, it must be triggered manually.

1 Like
43

… hmmm… actually, Rethe Prime is the “Battle Scape” currently in the game… at least from what I’ve understood thus far. Although, if I’m wrong either @INovaeKeith or @INovaeFlavien will slap me.

44

Then you raise a whole bunch of questions about how you determine whether you’re in battle, what happens when the battle is over, or what happens if you are about to automatically warp and are then engaged in combat.

45

I made a post in the dev forums back in august with a suggestion that was essentially an automatic/fluid warp system.

Excerpt below for (re)consideration:

You tradeoff combat effectiveness for engine effectiveness based on an energy management system…for anyone worried about people shooting in warp. Additionally, I would say that warp should drain any other capacitors,like weapons, so they need to be recharged before engaging in combat.

1 Like
46

I confess, I didn’t read everything, but one thing that sticks for me the the implication that warp auto engage at velocity “x”. Velocity relative to what?

Also, what if I want to fly on conventional drives at a speed in excess of that value?

47

The background. Everything except the ships is stationary, so Battlescape has a notion of a resting frame of reference. If the planet and moons moved, then things would get more complex, which is one reason Flavien didn’t try to tackle moving bodies right away.

What gameplay scenarios are compromised or eliminated by not being able to do so?

48

Perhaps this is what the radial menu could be for. In the same way we enable/disable Flight Assist, we could enable/disable auto-warp instead of manually triggering it every time (if I:B was to go with this method). So most of the time it would be active by default, but you could disable it and do a stealth glide :stuck_out_tongue:

49

Hmmmm, one right of the top of my head would be visibility. Your vessel might be less detectable outside of warp than in it.

Another could be attempting a high speed bomb drop on a relatively stationary target, especially if munitions like dumb bombs have long ranges. Smaller, faster moving munitions are less likely to be picked up and shot down in time. This could even be somewhat believable, if you imagine a munition chilled to super low temperatures and shaped like a stealth bomber to minimize detection.

A third could be based on a carrier launch system exceeding those velocities. This one would, of course, require a great deal of suspension of belief if we assume manned ships, but literally firing smaller vessels out at extreme velocities might develop interesting gameplay.

EDIIT: Actually, it doesn’t even require any particular suspension of belief. Accelerating at ~25.5g for four seconds only requires a 2km “runway,” which is an acceleration John Stapp survived for 1.1 seconds in the rocket sled (he actually saw 46.2g at peak). Of course, that’s assuming a carrier that is stationary relative to the system: if the carrier is moving at 500m/s at the time of launching, then the small craft could only afford a 500m/s increase in velocity before automatically warping.

50

Stealthy approaches can be handled with other systems. I would argue that they need to be because I may want to make a stealthy approach from some distance far greater than conventional drives could accomplish in a reasonable amount of time. So I’d want stealth even while in warp.

I’d argue that sensors are active, so if you want to see, you have to be seen. And if you don’t want to be seen, you can’t see. Pick your level of seeing and being seen to fit the circumstances.

Essentially, you’re carrying a flashlight at night. You can see and be seen based on the power of that flashlight.

All manner of high speed attack would be lost, certainly (barring any weapons that can be released while on warp).

The question is whether high relative attack speeds add anything to engagements. They clearly add a dimension of skill and variety for the attackers, but if the defenders can’t do anything but sit and let their shields absorb the hits then it’s not much of a gameplay mechanic. It would work well in a single player or PvE game, but I’m not so sure about a PvP game.

What would be the counter to the high speed attack?

Also, all high speed attacks would have to be balanced such that nobody can just skate across the thruster/warp boundary while attacking. That is, warp at 2000m/s towards a target, drop to 1999m/s, drop a bomb, then go back to 2000m/s and resume on warp.

That’s not really an issue. If I say that I’m on thrusters up to 1000m/s and on warp above that, and both are newtonian, then it doesn’t matter which one I’m using when involved in straight movement scenarios. If the networking code can tolerate 5000m/s ships flying side by side, then Carriers can launch and recover ships at up to 5000m/s. At low speeds, they’ll be on thrusters. At higher speeds, they’ll be on warp.

Note that the warp prototype could handle all ship interactions between 0 and 50c absolute speed and 0 and 3km/s relative speed.

And while I’m daydreaming, what happens when warp interdiction becomes a thing? If I’m automatically put into warp at 1000m/s and I’ve been warp interdicted, surely I’m going to just keep firing my thrusters and keep going as Battlescape operates today. So any areas of warp interdiction are going to need to deal with high speeds combat. Unless thrusters just don’t go faster than 1000m/s (suggesting that thrusters aren’t rockets, but some other technology).

51

Currently warp bloats out your emissions and you become detectable from the next moon, so it seems the devs have something else in mind.

The devs have stated that target information is shared across a faction, so you would still see what others see.

1 Like
52

Weapons that use the predictability of said attacks. Low range flack shields. Shield bubble enlargers, crash into wall. Stuff like that.

Smaller targets can just strafe out of the way. The window of being attacked is much smaller than in a regular situation.

Bigger targets will probably have weapons like described above to defend against smaller targets.

Big ships against big ships it is then … if big ships don’t have fast tracking guns they are already nerved by only allowing them to shoot when approaching or when departing the target.

The counter would be to anticipate said attacks and act such that they don’t inflict any damage as well as maybe using tools that work well at close range or predefined positions (mine field, maybe).

They would trade in some of their “usual” battle preparedness for hit and run preparedness.

A usual “fair” head on engagement also doesn’t have a hard counter. Maybe they can be each others counters. Have people use these two and other tactics to try to squeeze out more damage with the resources and time they have.

Anyway. I don’t like that “warp/thruster barrier”. I agree that it would probably create many such situations. Having energy or something else not related to absolute speed be the limiting factor is preferable in my opinion.
Also don’t really get that whole automatic idea. If it is a seamless system with a gradient. Maybe. The current, definitely different, warp and thruster system? Don’t see much gained except for complexity and edge cases by making it somehow automatic.

53

Interesting. We just did the reverse on our ARMA server. The map only shows you what you can see. If you want to know what others are seeing, you have to interact with them. We thought that the automatic sharing just encouraged a single player mindset.

Note that the default ARMA behavior is that you share with others in your group. We’re relying on the fact that the default comm channel is with others in your group.

I’m not going near your point defenses. In space I don’t have to. I can throw a bomb as far as I like. The bigger the target, the better.

Unless I can’t. If Battlescape just says that weapons never travel farther than N kilometers, then it’s a moot point. If it says that they stay around for N seconds, then it’s a potential problem.

I was more interested in active defenses such as Interceptors doing something to go after the Bombers - which is their job, of course. If Bombers are normally employed in a way that renders Interceptors pointless then the gameplay probably isn’t coming together particularly well.

All those Star Wars scenarios involve ships flying around at WWII speeds. The scenarios that George Lucas used were straight out of WWII movies. If Battlescape is trying to duplicate that feel, it’s going to want to keep the combat speeds down.

I see the distinct thruster and warp systems as the source of the complexity and edge cases. Clearly I’m biased, but a single movement system screams at me as the way to approach this. Modes are just evil things.

54

If you really want the ability to perform high speed attacks, just make it so that weapons work while in warp. It’s an artificial limitation anyway. I don’t think it’s a good idea though, higher absolute velocities exacerbate and netcode problems, so limiting all combat to below around 1000m/s is probably a good thing.

2 Likes
55

While not as “bright” a light as active radar, no ship will ever be so dark as to be undetectable, even with modern technology.

Early detection (reason to use active radars). Maneuverability (you have as long a response as it takes to land a hit from point of release). Difficulty in landing a “dumb” shot from any significant distance. Point defenses, if the munition is detectable. There’s a number of counters, some based on weapon skill, some based on defender’s piloting, and some just based on physics.

That’s a problem with the system you suggested, not one with “push to warp.” The obvious solution is to implement a cool down after dropping from warp, impacted by any number of variables that help with gameplay.
Alternatively, offering equipment for ships that acts as a warp disruptor. Want to warp back out? Better either get far enough away or destroy the problem.

It is if certain systems only work when not in warp. If there’s no such difference, what’s the point of warp? Might as well just call it a super-powerful engine booster.

Ideally (for me) this would be a toggle. We already can assume that there will not be a speed-of-light delay on information relaying, so it seems absurd to assume ships don’t have some sort of instantaneous information relay. Instead, it would be a toggle where you can opt to receive or transmit and receive, and transmitting means giving away your location to the enemy.

56

I “liked” your post because I’d love to see any step in the direction what amounts to full-time warp, but the current limitation is only artificial in the sense that it’s technically possible to remove it. INS is going with a networking code implementation that makes the limitation very real. Combat at 10km/s with the current networking code is apparently impractical.

Also, I’d claim that limiting combat to around 1000m/s relative (the warp prototype used 3000m/s) is good for gameplay itself. As I said, all those Star Wars fights take place at WWII speeds. Low WWII speeds. Maybe 150m/s. I’d love to know what the typical relative velocity is between a ship and its target in Battlescape right now. From what I’ve seen of the videos, the relative velocities stay pretty low. Otherwise, you’re making slashing attacks, meaning that you make a high speed run, overshoot hugely, stop, go back and do it again. A half joust.

It’s a problem with any system that confers invulnerability in a modal fashion. A cool down would be insufficient because players would just work that into their strategy. The point is that players want the invulnerability of warp, and they’ll do everything they can to work it into their plans. INS is going to spend a lot of time making sure that players can’t exploit warp invulnerability because players are going a lot of time trying to exploit it.

The scenario presented was about launching ships, which is a movement scenario. Warp and thrusters just move ships around, so there’s no issue there. If the implication is that ships can no longer fight effectively because they’d quickly go to warp, the answer is that Carriers wouldn’t drop their ships close to the warp transition speed unless that was part of The Plan.

I could buy that, given the behavior you describe.

Note that quoting fictional rationale is never going to fly with me. Gameplay always trumps fiction. It’s why warp exists, nukes don’t, and why people don’t just drop rocks on cities that they don’t like.

Not to mention that people are still killing each other when they have casual interstellar travel.

1 Like
57

Technically, warp is not an invulnerability mode but a escape mechanism. Shots that connect still do full damage in warp.

58

Also, and this is not directly related to warp, but I have found that fights at the moment naturally bring you down to slower speeds <500m/s for the sake of manoeuvrability. High speed attacks only seem to be valuable if you can accurately land a highly damaging attack in one pass (corvettes are great at this at the minute!).

Of course, new weapons might open new possibilities!

Anyway, back on topic…

59

The exact image the word bomber brings to my mind. There are ships that skilled pilots won’t do this with, because it’s been found inefficient given how long it takes to kill (or that’s how it used to be, anyway). That being said, the word bomber conjures an image of a lumbering, not overly agile, long reload, high damage, low “forgiveness” ship that makes sweeping runs dropping either many small bombs or a few powerful ones.

That’s not to say it couldn’t be something else, like a smaller corvette with fewer bigger caliber guns, but that’s not what I imagine it to be.

60

This changed somewhat with the new AI. PVP battles stayed the same.
It’s also highly depended on a ships maneuverability.

In the last update it was usually bellow 500m/s.

With the new AI it’s not unusual to see whole bunches of NPC furrballs moving about at around 500m/s. Chasing each other. And if you want to engage them you also have to align yourself to that speed.

Even farther in the past it wasn’t unusual to slip into a high absolute velocity fight as one of the involved parties moved somewhat differently than the other part.

We didn’t test max, reasonable absolute speed at witch fighting starts to become noticeable unplayable.

I agree that we should talk about what we like about the current gameplay and what other gameplay we would like. I would love to have every possibility to engage Targets anywhere anyhow and to not have to worry about interdiction/disruption gizmos, I’m okay with not being able to leave instantly, I just don’t like the idea of a thing one could activate to trap someone …

As this is technically challenging I would be ok with a compromise that at least creates a gradual barrier. Where you “could” theoretically try to engage targets in situations where the software would struggle but it would be (much) less effective.

For instance, one example that was partially mentioned. Instead of max travel time of weapons, have all weapons have a max absolute travel distance.
This would naturally make people want to stay at lower speeds in order to be able to have the most range on their weapons.

When people then try to run away. It would be a gradual transition to 'safety" instead of an abrupt one when they shoot off with their warp.

Concerning running away. It’s really hard to tell what would be fun there. I think I-Novae has the right idea of priorities.
Warp should be low on the list. Weapons, Bases, Objectives … probably much less controversial. Maybe running away wouldn’t even be that much of an annoyance if your main objective isn’t necessarily to swat every little interceptor out there …